Commercials enjoy a privileged place in one of the most important institutions of everyday life - television. Such is their prominence that a comparison can be made to the icons gracing the walls of a much older institution, the medieval cathedral. Paul Rutherford admits that the analogy can be carried too far, but he sees commercials as 'the art of our times' and approaches them as an art historian would. Like icons, commercials can be 'read' for particular styles or for the myths of a national culture; like icons, they are instruments of cultural power.
Rutherford is an aficionado of...

Is there any public discourse left, or has advertising, with its aggressive sales techniques, usurped the role of democratic, civil debate? Beginning in the 1960s, there was a proliferation of social, political, and corporate advertising in affluent, developed nations that spoke to the "public good" on everything from milk to family values. Surveying over 10,000 advertisements from the past 40 years, "Endless Propaganda" underscores the presence of advertising rhetoric, even in the context of apparently non-partisan collective health issues such as cancer.

The public sphere, argues...

With nearly sixty percent of Americans initially against a pre-emptive war without sanction from the United Nations, and even higher anti-war numbers in most other nations of the world, the 2003 war against Iraq quickly became an enormous public relations challenge for the George W. Bush administration. The subject of Weapons of Mass Persuasion is a war in which American patriotism became so mired in commercial jingoism that the demarcations between entertainment and political conduct disappeared completely.

In this engaging and disturbing book, Paul Rutherford shows how the...

The cult of eroticism is a pervasive force in modern society, affecting almost every aspect of our daily lives. In this book, Paul Rutherford argues that this phenomenon is a product of one of the major commercial and political enterprises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the creation of desire - for sex, for wealth, and for entertainment.

A World Made Sexy examines museum exhibitions, art, books, magazines, films, and television to explore the popular rise of eroticism in America and across the developed world. Starting with a brief foray into the history of...

A decade after the first Canadian telecasts in September 1952, TV had conquered the country. Why was the little screen so enthusiastically welcomed by Canadians? Was television in its early years more innovative, less commerical, and more Canadian than current than current offerings? In this study of what is often called the 'golden age' of television, Paul Rutherford has set out to dispel some cherished myths and to resurrect the memory of a noble experiment in the making of Canadian culture.

He focuses on three key aspects of the story. The first is the development of the national...